Pages

Friday, 12 April 2013

DOMITIAN: A MUCH MIS-UNDERSTOOD HUMAN BEING AND EMPEROR, BY MC (Manda) SCOTT

One of the joys
of writing historical fiction, as opposed to historical ‘fact’ for academia is
the freedom to engage with the personalities of the people I study.I can read between the lines and I can infer
what seems to me obvious but may fly in the face of academically accepted
‘Truth.’

I am studying
Jeanne d’Arc just now and have had several historians offer to help as long as
I don’t cite them in the acknowledgements for fear of annihilating their
professional credicibility: it’s an accepted truth that she was a peasant girl
who had visions of Saints and whose faith enabled her to undertake miraculous
feats of arms – and this despite the fact that she didn’t speak of saints until
the third day of her trial when she was being threatened with torture if she
didn’t (she spoke of ‘my father in heaven’ and ‘messire’ which is what a squire
called the knight he served, but never of saints).It also leaves aside the fact that it doesn’t
matter how much faith you have, faith by its nature does not let one mount a
war horse in full armour and couch a lance in battle: that takes decades of
training.

But that’s for
another post, a year from now, very likely, when I can go into a lot more
detail of who and why and how the woman who called herself Jeanne achieved all
that she did.

Today I want to
look at another much –spun character from history; this time, one who has been
demonized rather than canonized and whereas Domitian was clearly a
hard-tempered emperor and more than likely paranoid, it is also the true that
in the case of Emperors, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not
out to get you.

Born into virtual
poverty, at least by senatorial standards, Domitian was the second son of a
second son. His father, Vespasian, was the son of a ‘tax-farmer’ and mule
seller who only entered the senate on the urgings of his mother and older
brother; there’s every indication that he’d have been very happy as a military
strategist and has no love of politics.But politics and the army ran hand in hand in the Empire and to be a
general, one had also to be a senator; which is one of the several reasons why
some of Rome’s legions were quite so badly led (the Twelfth, for instance, was
landed with a series of exceptionally bad commanders which largely led to its
appellation as the ‘unlucky Twelfth’)

Domitian: photo from Wikimedia Commons

What Vespasian
lacked in political ambition, he made up for in his martial skills and he was
well on the way to conquering Judaea when Vitellius, third of the emperors to
hold the throne in the Year of Four made the mistake of sending an assassin out
to eradicate his supposed opponent; and thus turned Vespasian into that which
he most feared.

The resulting
civil war tore Rome apart, but Vespasian and his glorious, supremely attractive
elder son, Titus, kept out of the way in Alexandria while their legions gained
them the throne.Domitian, by contrast,
remained in Rome the whole time, which can, I think, go a long way to
explaining what he became when he finally inherited the throne for himself.

Domitian was not
inclined to war.He was not particularly
inclined to politics but being second son of the Emperor made him de facto a
Senator and he took a consulship when his father died and Titus, the glorious
brother gained the throne.

Domitian’s mother
died in his youth and he was raised and cared for by Caenis, the freedomwoman
who was Vespasian’s life partner and love. Together, they ended up caught in the Temple
to the three gods (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva) on the heights of the Capitoline,
and together they fled when it was burned to the ground by Vitellius’
forces.They spent a night hiding in a
cellar then escaped from Rome disguised as priests of Isis – they wore papier
mache dog’s heads designed to make them look like Anubis, the dog-headed god,
and they carried some of the wealth of Isis out of the city into the suburbs on
the safer south side of the city as Caecina’s pro-Flavian troops lined up ready
to assault their brethren inside.He hid
out in the house of a school friend and then returned at the end of Saturnalia,
when the civil war had reached its bloody conclusion, to hold the throne in the
name of his father.

He didn’t rule,
then, though: the general Mucianus arrives smartly on the heels of victory and
took over. Ruling through Domitian, he swiftly disposed of anyone who might
prove problematic to Vespasian when he finally reached Rome from
Alexandria.Mucianus was effective, but
ruthless – a scion of the Piso family who seemed as if he might make a
tentative claim for damages or preferment was taken on a chariot ride forty
miles out of the city and required to kill himself – we can only imagine under
what kinds of threats.His death quieted
a lot of the other naysayers who were suggesting that a second son of such lowly
background might not make the perfect Emperor. Others were palmed off with
positions in the military which kept them quiet and a long way from Rome.

So Domitian had
an early schooling in the kinds of decisions necessary to keep a throne
stable.On top of that, we know that by
the time of the year of the four Emperors, he had grown into a young man whose
main hobby was the collection of dead flies pinned to a board, who went to bed
at six o’clock out of preference and didn’t particularly like socializing.He was brusque and often said what he
thought, which was a novelty in the upper circles of Roman society.

He was, in short,
rather far along the spectrum of behaviour we would consider to be Asberger’s
syndrome.This doesn’t stop him from
being brilliant: Einstein, Michelangelo and Marie Curie are all thought to have
had Asberger’s and each in his/her own way made a profound impression on the
world.It might also go some way to
explaining why Domitian made such a good executive officer. His father took
over an Empire that was in economic melt down after the depradations of Nero
and the chaos of Vitellius.In his ten
year reign, went a long way to balancing the books, but it took Domitian to take
the exchequer into the black – by dint of devaluing the coins and reducing
their silver content, but also by creating a massive building programme,
courtesy of the treasury, which has to count as one of the first obvious acts
of Keynsian economics every practiced.

He spent money on
wars: Agricola moved up into the north of Britain and fought the battle of Mons
Graupius against the forces of Calgacus, leading to Tacitus infamous ‘speech of
Calgacus’ in which he says of Rome, ‘They wrought a desolation and called it
peace.’ (we could say pretty much the same now of Margaret Thatcher).He extended the empire into Dacia (current
day Romania and Moldovia, with a few other bits of Balkan territories added in)
and made secure the boundaries in ways they had not been with his predecessors.

Above all, he
endeavoured to become a guardian of the public morals, which given his own
bisexuality was an interesting piece of psychodrama.

What he didn’t
do, was to make friends with the Senate, so that when he was finally
slaughtered by his own (rightly paranoid) courtiers, those who wrote the
histories were free to treat him as a lunatic and a despot when in fact, his greatest crime had been to over-ride the sensibilities of the Senate. Writing 'Rome: The Art of War' was intended as an exploration of the Year of the Four Emperors. What I had not expected was that I would strive to understand the mind and thinking of the young man who was destined to sit on the throne twice: before his father's return from Alexandria and again after his brother's death. The end result was - as is always the case - very different to my imagining, but far more nuanced than some of the histories would have us believe.

And if you are interested in Joan of Arc, here is a cute, short, educational music video. (Mrs.Burvall was even interviewed about it, by some French People, re: the recent Anniversaries on Joan, in France.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQydMhY9OpIAnd here is one on ancient Rome:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4E5wDCK2QFor more info, Google Amy Burvall & Herb Mahelona.

How interesting! And yes, Joan must have learned warfare somewhere. Unless you just think that reality was different in those days.. Domitian's statue looks really lifelike, and I thought he did look like a geek, which would fit in with the Aspergers theory. Isn't it odd, though, to think of people having Aspergers and other conditions, before they had been identified as such? So were the people what their contemporaries thought they were, or what we wouls think they were?

Search the History Girls

The History Girls

The History Girls are a group of best-selling, award-winning writers of historical fiction and non-fiction. Some of us write for young adults, some for fully fledged adults, some for younger readers.

Among us, we cover every period from the Stone Age to World War II. Geographically, our novels will take you from Trondheim to Troy, and the Caribbean to the Wild West, via Venice, Victorian England and Ancient Rome.

Individual, entertaining, sometimes provocative: on this daily blog we'll share our thoughts on writing, research, reviews, and all aspects of our work. We love what we do and we want to talk about it. We hope you'll want to join in!

If you want a History Girl to appear at an event or write an article or review, please contact her via her website (links are all goven on the About Us page)

Owing to an overwhelming amount of Spam, we have had to disable Anonymous Comments. Please do comment but you'll have to Follow us first.

Just scroll down in this right-hand column to under Followers and click Join this Site. Thanks.